This Week on the Farm 12/17
I can’t believe it is mid-December already! Where is the snow? The one significant snowfall we have had so far is gone, melted by this weekend’s dreary rain. The rain seems to have taken all of the frost out of the ground as well. It needs to get cold now! Without a hard frost that goes fairly deep into the soil, we will be in for an insect filled growing season next year!
Big news on the farm! We have been accepted as members of FairShare CSA Coalition for 2013 and will now be able to offer insurance rebates for members who have Unity Health insurance. This is in addition to the rebates from Dean Health, Physicians Plus, and Group Health Cooperative that we are already able to provide our members. We are hoping that over the next several years more insurance companies will start to incentivize healthy eating by giving rebates for CSA memberships. If your insurance provider doesn’t provide a rebate please contact them to show your interest. If no one displays an interest, they probably will not start a program on their own.
We have finished putting our seed order together for 2013 for all of our veggies. I called High Mowing Seeds today and signed up for their CSS share. Their CSS share is like a CSA, only for seeds. If you sign up by December 21, you receive 10% off of your order. By signing up for this share we were able to save a bunch of money that we are going to put towards purchasing more strawberry plants. I will be uploading our 2013 crop list to the website in the next week or two, we just have to finalize what herbs we will be growing next year. Keep your fingers crossed that the Ancho Poblano Pepper seed will not go out of stock again this year!!! Last year we were not able to find organic poblano seed anywhere!
Speaking of the website, I overhauled every page on our website, so check it out! For more information on the health insurance rebates click on the photo next to where it says “Health Insurance Rebates Available” on the home page. 2013 pricing has been updated as well. You will notice that we did raise prices for 2013 after keeping them the same for two seasons. There are multiple reasons for this including the cost of organic certification that will be occurring in the 2013 calender year and increases in the cost of seed/media/fertilizer/bio-controls/general supplies/fuel/etc. By raising the prices we are now charging closer to what other CSAs are charging for a twenty week season. For 2012 returning members, remember, if you sign-up by March 15, you will be able to get 2012 pricing for the vegetable shares.
Shares will go on sale January 1st and I will upload the 2013 sign-up sheet to the website in the next day or so. Returning members, I will email a separate sign-up sheet to you with the correct pricing by the first of the year. We are still waiting to finalize a couple of pick-up sites, so if you don’t see a specific site on the website, don’t despair!
That’s all for this week. Happy Holidays!